The Jerry Springer Show / YMMV

Crosses the Line Twice: Umm... the whole show, really, but these moments stand out:
- On any other talk show, having the guests attack each other would be national news. Here? They have a fight bell. Ding ding!
- Classic lines like these:
  "Wull ah don't need a vie-brator cuz ah gut ma husband!!"
  "Wull yer HUSBAND needs a vie-brator cuz yoo gut DI-SEASE!!"
- One guy broke up with his girlfriend on the show on her birthday with a cake decorated with the message "Happy birthday, it's over". It's awful and morbidly funny at the same time.
Expectation Lowerer: Every guest. One of the reasons people get such pleasure from this show is the schadenfreude of gloating at how pathetic most of the guests are.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The Jerry Springer Show was popular in the UK, to the point it got parodied on the radio impressions series Dead Ringers and spawned the UK equivalent The Jeremy Kyle Show. The musical Jerry Springer: The Opera was created by two Brits.
Memetic Mutation: JERRY! JERRY! JERRY! to the point that any time there's a fight in real life, you can expect it to be chanted.
Narm Charm: Springer is the silliest, most overwrought show on television. That's why we love it.
No Such Thing as Bad Publicity:
- In 2002, TV Guide referred to the Jerry Springer Show as the "worst TV show of all time". Soon after, Springer began to embrace the "endorsement" by introducing the show as "worst TV show of all time" at the start of each episode.
- One episode focused on something mundane (given the show's usual fare), such as "weird hobbies". The first people they brought out? Bronies. In the video package leading up to it, they showed screencaps of various Facebook campaigns specifically warning Bronies not to be on the show, and yet quite a few of them showed up, either out of poor judgement or simple bravado.^note
Periphery Demographic: Springer was popular with children home sick from school. Other daytime TV shows (such as The Price Is Right and Judge Judy) had this reputation, but Springer was much less family-friendly. Most kids ignored the content warning at the beginning of each episode.
Seasonal Rot:
- A vocal part of the fanbase feels like the show's salad days was from approximately 1995-1999, when the show still tried to maintain at least the appearance of being a respectable talk show with a warm set and an upbeat theme song, creating a significant dissonance between the setting and the show's content. Thus, in their eyes, this happened when the show started leaning hard into the "Trash TV" motif in 2000. The number of pre-2000 episodes that now circulate in reruns may support their argument.
- The show did get rather formulaic and predictable towards the end, because after being on the air for a quarter century you're going to eventually run out of shocking family secrets and bizarre sexual fetishes to share. Jerry himself made a habit of lampshading this in the later seasons.
  Jerry: "Your wife brings you on this show because she wants to tell you a secret. 'I wonder what it is....did you win the lottery?'"
So Bad, It's Good: The show is considered to be a guilty pleasure to many.
Unintentional Period Piece: Among the "Sizzling Lesbian Sex Scandals" in the 1990s episodes was one woman revealing to her lover that she's going to be getting married to the person she's cheating with, immediately tipping the lover off that the third person is male before we get a chance to see who they are. This dates these episodes to a time when same sex marriage wasn't legally recognized anywhere in the United States.
Values Dissonance: The show's insistent use of tropes like Trans Equals Gay and Unsettling Gender-Reveal didn't age well, sounding very transphobic nowadays.

YMMV / The Jerry Springer Show

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